


Memory Failure

by taylor_tut



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Connor (Detroit: Become Human) Whump, Gen, Head Injury, Hurt Connor (Detroit: Become Human), Major Character Injury, Memory Loss, Protective Hank Anderson, Sick Character, Sickfic, Whump, Worried Hank Anderson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-15
Updated: 2018-09-15
Packaged: 2019-07-12 13:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15995897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: A birthday request from my tumblr for Connor taking a blow to the head and having some memory issues that he hides in favor of working on the case at hand, which becomes progressively more difficult as Hank won't leave him alone about it.





	Memory Failure

Connor could have sworn that he hadn’t taken any damage when he’d gone down, but he was starting to doubt his own judgement, something he rarely did. Connor didn’t trust his instincts because he didn’t HAVE instincts—he had facts, preliminary analyses, usually encompassing multiple possible scenarios, and he pursued the objectively most likely one. In the interest of objectivity, he ran another full-body scan, which, surprise surprise, came back clean. After several moments of staring blankly at his keyboard, he blinked and realized for the first time that someone was trying to get his attention. 

“Connor!” Hank demanded, sounding as if he’d already said his name several times. “Already checked out for the day?”

Connor shook his head and regretted the motion instantly, feeling almost as if the processing units that lived in his head, which was most of them, kept whirling even after he stopped moving. 

“I’m right here,” Connor tried not to snap. “I’m listening. What did you need?”

Hank blinked a few times in surprise at the clipped tone. “Jeez,” he submitted, “no need to bite my head off. I was just gonna ask if you wanted to join me for lunch.”

“You know I don’t eat, Lieutenant,” Connor pointed out, but in truth, he sort of hoped that he could have a break, anyway.

“Yeah, I know,” Hank rolled his eyes. “You just looked like you could stand to get away from the computer for a few. How ‘bout it, huh?” Connor stood, watching his vision turn to static as soon as he was upright. After a moment, it sort-of-but-not-really faded, but the buzzing in his ears remained, making it difficult to concentrate. However, he tried to ignore that as he followed after Hank toward the truck.

The ride was quiet. On days like this, Hank didn’t have time to eat at a food truck or in a restaurant, so instead he drove through somewhere. Even after all this time, it still felt rude to not offer anything to Connor, but every time he’d done it in the past, he’d gotten the same reply: “I don’t require food or drink, Lieutenant.”

That’s why it was so surprising when, before Hank could pull away from the window, Connor asked if he could order a to-go cup of ice. 

“What for?” Hank asked after ordering it anyway. When he pulled up to the window to pay, he caught sight of Connor’s face as he leaned in to grab his wallet, and he frowned. “And why the hell’s your light red?”

He might have confessed to feeling overheated, but the LED mystery took precedence. Connor pulled down the sun visor and glanced in the mirror to find that his LED was, indeed, cycling a slow red. It didn’t make sense—his stress levels weren’t notably high, and he’d already checked for damage so many times that he’d lost count. Wait, he’d lost count?

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” Connor replied, starting to question the validity of that answer. However, if anything, it was a lie by omission: it wasn’t nothing, but it was nothing that couldn’t wait until they’d solved the case. 

Hank wolfed down his burger and soda on the drive to the red ice lab about half an hour outside the precinct. By the time they arrived, Connor found that he had to shake himself fully awake, his mind slowed by that momentary lag that usually preceded standby mode. Even after he stood and closed the car door behind him, he found that the feeling didn’t go away, and that it was accompanied by an uncomfortable amount of pressure in his head, too. 

“Okay, Connor,” Hank started, already several steps ahead of him in the driveway of the abandoned house, putting up police tape to warn passersby to stay away, “I’m going to block off the area; you can go in and do your thing.”

Connor blinked a few times, reaching for a response in his head and not finding one. When he paused to look at Hank, the “yes, sir,” appeared in his optional answers, but it disappeared again when he went to move his feet, replaced by an unusually overwhelming focus on the simple act of putting one foot in front of the other. 

“Sound like a plan?” Hank prompted upon not getting the verbal confirmation he expected, and Connor stopped short just to nod. Hank, however, engrossed in his work already, didn’t seem to notice the slight struggle—likely because it was very typical of an overtired, under-caffeinated human to seem sluggish and quiet. Sometimes, when Connor acted so human, it was difficult to remember that he wasn’t, and things got overlooked. 

Nevertheless, Connor decided to ignore the concerns that were rapidly forming in his mind so he could focus on the case. Thinking about anything else, it seemed, was too taxing a task to perform concurrently, so he, as always, would be objective in prioritizing. His obligations to the DPD came first. 

Inside, the building looked like any normal home. Connor’s stomach turned as he scanned the upstairs wreckage from the blown-up basement: a living room, cluttered with bills and other paperwork, two bedrooms, one of which contained a crib. He wondered whether the family who’d lived here had gotten out safe, then realized that that information would have most definitely been in the police report, which he’d read. However, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t seem to recall. There was a massive gap in his normal eidetic memory of the case report.

“Done lickin’ shit yet?” Hank asked, startling Connor, who hadn’t heard him enter the house nor the room he was in. 

“No, I haven’t gone downstairs,” Connor replied, and Hank looked genuinely shocked.

“Then what have you been doing in here for the past 10 minutes?” he asked. Had it really been that long? Connor wanted to reply, but he chose to rise to his feet instead, which completely threw off his train of thought. Standing, he found that his thoughts felt even farther away, just out of his reach, surrounded by cotton and fog. 

“Are you planning on moving any time soon?” Hank asked, but his tone, Connor assessed, was not one of genuine curiosity, but accusatory. Hank was irritated at him for something. He tried to pull up what he might have to apologize for and came back with nothing except several more silent, wasted seconds that Hank had used to stare at him with an impatient glare. 

Connor shook himself once more, rubbing a hand down his face like some of the detectives sometimes did when they were tired—though his own programming found no use for the action, humans wouldn’t do it if it didn’t provide some amount of comfort, right? And Connor desperately needed comfort. The pressure in his head was only building, at this point to an extent that he might even hazard to call pain. 

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Connor said, though he still wasn’t sure for what he was apologizing. “I’ll be down in the basement.” 

A warning, the first one since he’d been hit and he presumed not the last, flashed across his vision: apparently, his self-diagnostic, though two hours delayed, had finally detected damage to his head, namely to his battery. No wonder he felt so sluggish—it was taking twice the energy it normally would just to stand and speak, and his background functions were all fucked up, requiring so much charge to run that he had an official shutdown time, a projected rate of deterioration should he continue at this rate: 00:31:47. Half an hour. That was not enough time to finish the investigation. 

“Connor!” Hank barked, startling Connor into realizing that he was once more standing still to read the diagnostic. “What the fuck is with you today? You’re spacey.” 

Connor nodded and internally, wordlessly, switched off his fan system, knowing that the heat of the basement wouldn’t be enough to cause more than a little discomfort rather than a deadly overheat. Without really considering them, he switched a few more things off, while he was at it, scrolling down the list of his functions and closing all the ones he wouldn’t need right now. Human appeasing protocol? Nah, Hank hated that one, anyway. Expressive voice and facial features could go, too. Unemotive was just as effective a way to communicate. Memories that aren’t related to the case at hand? He could disable them until after he got his head fixed.

In disabling non essential memories, he deleted the fact that Hank had just asked him a question which was definitely not rhetorical, and instead of replying, turned around and headed toward the basement. 

Hank followed Connor into the basement, willing to write off the kid’s weird mood as just that—a weird mood. Connor was still only getting the hang of feeling at all, so this was bound to happen. In the basement, Connor remained quiet, pensive, so Hank let him do his thing until he started to get the impression that perhaps Connor was pouting about something. 

“Hey, does this case remind you of anything?” Hank asked, hoping to test his theory by seeing if Connor would object to a conversation that might lighten the mood. Connor took a beat longer than he normally would, but replied nevertheless. 

“Remind me of something?” he parrotted, not understanding the question. “Like what?”

Hank leaned in with a disbelieving expression. Even Fowler, who hadn’t even worked the case last month whose details had matched these nearly entirely, had commented on the similarities. 

“You know, another case,” Hank offered. Without expression, Connor shook his head. He felt like he was listening to Hank from under water, having to strain just to grasp bits and pieces. The only thing he had energy for was the case. Everything else was crumbling around him.

“Do you just not want to talk to me?” Hank accused hostilely. “Are you still mad about last night?”

Connor didn’t blink, didn’t move. “Last night?” he asked in a tone that was so genuinely confused that it made Hank almost question whether he was crazy. They’d definitely argued, because Hank had agreed that he’d cut back to only having fast food two nights a week and only hitting the bar three, but since this week had been tough and time consuming, he’d exceeded both, then lashed out at Connor for the lecture he received. 

“Yeah, ‘cause I fought with ya,” Hank supplied slowly. Connor remained silent. “So I guess that’s a yes?”

“I do not recall such an argument,” Connor replied, his voice sounding truly robotic for the first time Hank had ever heard. 

“You don’t remember?” Hank repeated, stepping toward Connor, who’d already tuned out the conversation in favor of analyzing evidence, and therefore didn’t notice when Hank stooped down to his knees in front of him to look him in the eyes. 

“May I help you, Lieutenant?” Connor asked in a tone that would likely normally be irritated but now was just dull and tired. 

“Hell, kid,” Hank mumbled, “what’s the matter with your eyes?” Connor’s pupils, which normally constricted and dilated to allow light in as necessary, were now resting in a strange in-between in which one was huge and the other pinprick, so that instead of changing their size constantly, which was a background program that was now demanding too much energy to run, he could just only use the optical input from the better-suited one; in this case, the more heavily dilated. 

“Hank,” Connor pleaded, finally acknowledging that coming clean would be the only way that Hank would be satisfied enough that Connor could focus and get this stupid case over with and go home to repair and charge, “please, just leave me alone. I sustained damage to my battery earlier and I’ve shut down nonessential memory and functions, but I’ve still only given myself perhaps 15 more minutes before shutdown. May I finish gathering evidence?”

Hank frowned, taking Connor’s chin in his hand and rotating it from side to side, looking in his eyes and finally noticing the damaged parts that loomed below his hairline.

“You’re running a bit warm. Does it hurt?” he asked, a question which threw Connor off. 

“I don’t know,” he replied honestly, “what pain feels like.”

Hank rolled his eyes. “It means, would you rather be home in bed than here in a damp, stuffy rom?”

Connor didn’t lie, so he nodded. 

“Then come on,” Hank resigned, helping a still-dizzy Connor to his feet and steadying him once he got there. “Let’s get you home.”

“But the case—”

“Can wait a day,” Hank interjected. “If it gets hot again, then Fowler can assign somebody else to substitute, but you’re not gonna be able to solve it if you’re collapsed on the floor, anyway, right?” 

Connor shrugged, knowing that Hank was right but not wanting him to be—he’d wanted to solve this one, damn it, and they were getting close. At least, he thought they were. 

“Let’s go, kid,” Hank instructed, already fishing his keys out of his pocket and leaving no room for argument. “You can lick clues later. For now, let’s just get you patched up.” 

Connor couldn’t bring himself to fight Hank about it. 


End file.
